INTERNATIONAL: PERU - ENFORCEMENT - COMPETITION POLICY - COLLUSION - CARTELS - LENIENCY

Peru: Competition law enforcement - Reaching maturity

KEYWORDS

This article describes the most recent changes and trends in Peru’s competition law enforcement. After presenting an overview of Peru’s competition law and policy, the author depicts the evolution of Indecopi (Peru’s competition authority) in its fight against horizontal collusion and shows evidence of the increase effectiveness in the prosecution of cartels, as a result of the strengthening of the leniency program. The author also reviews the new steps being taken by Indecopi: new guidelines for promoting competition in public procurement and the beginning of a rewards program for cartels’ whistleblowers.

Introduction 1. “As a competition system achieves success in attacking private restraints, it increases the efforts that firms will devote to obtaining public restraints.” [1] This quote is from Timothy Muris’ speech—then chair of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission—at the 2003 Fordham Annual Conference on International Antitrust Law & Policy. When I first read that speech, in 2007, as a young lawyer working at the Peruvian National Institute for the Defense of Competition and the Protection of Intellectual Property (Indecopi), Muris’ statement left me wondering. Not because of its lack of foundation, rather quite the opposite. My concerns were motivated by its likely truthfulness. A decade ago, public restraints to competition were not a major issue in Peru. We were mainly

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